Self Employed Success

I’m just like you — just like every entrepreneur I know. I have a million ideas and I want to do them ALL right away!

But I learned an important and enlightening lesson last year that I’d like to share with you. By focusing all my attention, energy, time and resources on one big project, I increased my income (even during a recession), and more importantly I was happier and more relaxed.

I was shocked! Even though experts had been telling me for years to focus on just one thing, I didn’t want to give up my freedom and creativity. I liked having multiple projects to work on. It made me feel vibrant and alive. But it also made me feel unproductive, cranky, overwhelmed, and a nervous wreck. And guilty because I was having a hard time completing just one of those projects to my satisfaction. Hmmmm.

Imagine you are driving down a busy highway at rush hour. Now imagine that there are three other people in the car with you, all trying to have a conversation with you. Now your cell phone rings. In between all this talking, ideas pop into your head so you pull out your mobile device to type in some text notes.

Crazy, right? You’ll have a car accident any minute now. Yet that’s exactly what you’re doing to your business when you try to focus on multiple projects or multiple goals simultaneously.

Multi-tasking Myth

In the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield said, “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once — but there is not time enough in the year if you will do two things at a time.”

Doing more than one thing at once doesn’t get more done and doesn’t make you more efficient. Recent studies by several research teams prove this point.

According to researchers at the University of Michigan, when you toggle between multiple tasks or multiple projects, you are using what’s known as the “executive control” process. This mental CEO has to choose priorities and allocate thinking/creativity resources. The more you switch between tasks, the longer it takes to re-focus attention and resources.

David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist at the University of Michigan said in a recent New York Times article, “Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes.” When it comes to your business, mistakes will cost you. Can you afford to lose time or money?

On a practical level, working on multiple projects simultaneously made me feel scattered, out-of-control, and diffused my intellectual and creative abilities. When I slowed down and focused on one major project for a full two months I felt more in control, much more relaxed, my confidence soared, and I was able to get the project completed a full four weeks ahead of schedule. It was as if I had been released from a multi-tasking prison of my own making. Talk about freedom!

Choose One, Master It, Move On

In his book, “Getting Things Done,” David Allen suggests you create a list of “Areas of Focus.” Start by looking at the areas you manage in your business (you can create a separate list for your personal life). In business you may have these areas: marketing, customer contact, product/service development, operations/administration, long-range planning, etc.

Next, list all your possible projects in each of these areas. Once you have your full projects list, look them over and ask yourself:

• Which project will most likely lead me towards my large business goals?
• Which project will lead me in the direction I want to take for my business?
• Which project am I ready to tackle now?
• Which project inspires me?
• Which project scares me?

Then choose one project that will have the biggest impact on the success of your business. If it scares you, ask yourself why. Figure out where you’ll need some help or some education in order to complete that project.

In speaking with some of my mastermind group members about this subject last week, they reminded me that you don’t have to focus on one thing for an entire year. Try it for three months or six months, and see what results you are getting, both financial and emotional.

Once you complete a project or master a new skill, then you can move on to the next one on your list. In this way, you can have BOTH things in your life: a successful business and getting multiple things done in one year.

First, choose one project. Finish it. Then move on to the next.

We just got our health insurance renewal in the mail. We knew there would be a price increase…there always is.

As self-employed small business owners, my husband and I have to buy private health insurance. This year’s increase? A whopping 13 percent!

What does that mean in reality? For us, it means digging a little deeper in our pockets to come up with the increased monthly premium. Luckily, we can afford it. Many small biz owners cannot.

Let’s play this out with some real-life numbers. In six years, at the given increase rate, our health insurance premium will have doubled. Instead of $700 a month, it will be over $1,400 a month — equal to an additional house mortgage payment.

And that’s if we don’t get sick. If we get sick, it’s possible that our premiums could skyrocket.

Most mature businesses would be hard-pressed to double their revenues every 6 years in order to keep up with increasing health insurance premium costs for the owners and their employees, without radically changing their business model. For many service providers, it would mean either doubling the amount of billable hours you work each week, increasing your own prices, or cutting back on expenses elsewhere. Or dropping your health insurance coverage completely.

Yes, I could increase revenue by hiring other small business coaches to work for Passion For Business, but that’s not a business model I’m interested in persuing. So does increased insurance premiums force small business owners to either change their business model against their will or go out of business? I believe the answer is “yes” more often than we’d like.

I’m not here to argue politics or health care reform. I’m here to paint a simple picture of what massive health insurance costs are doing to people like me: self-employed small business owners.

Earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released new guidelines on what’s acceptable practice for businesses using testimonials and “celebrity” endorsements. You can see the summary news release here.

So why do we care? Because the FTC clearly states that results that are NOT typical, even if they use the disclaimer “results not typical” (like all those diet ads you see), are not acceptable. Per the FTC, “…advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or service as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally expect.”

That is so cool!!  What this means is that all those ads that promise you will lose 100 pounds or make $1,000,000 in 30 days can’t promise that anymore, if those results aren’t typical. This is especially importantant in the world of internet marketing, where some (not all, but some) gurus make exaggerated claims about what their product or service can do for you, and only choose those testimonials that back up the exaggerated claims.

In addition to testimonials, the new guidelines also cover endorsements. So if a blogger says that XYZ Product is the best they’ve every used, they have to disclose that they got paid by the XYZ company for that endorsement, or even got a free copy of XYZ Product or some other freebie (like a free vacation) in exchange for their endorsement. They must also disclose any “material connection” with the XYZ company.  In their summary, the FTC says, “…connections that consumers would not expect.”

Yesterday, we released some testimonial videos from mastermind group participants where they talk about their experience with mastermind groups. I guess we’d better put in there that we gave them a free lunch as part of the mastermind group session, in return for their testimonial.

Resources:

• FTC’s summary news release
• The  full PDF of Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising
• The Wall Street Journal’s article on the topic

Is a mastermind group right for you?

My NEW Mastermind Groups promo video on YouTube can help answer those questions. We filmed in in August, then did a lot of brainstorming about what to include. I think the video folks did a great job! What do you think?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boGSOmzGCgo

We’re so pleased to announce that we’ve released a re-designed website that we did for Helga Matzko, owner of The Gestalt Institute of Rhode Island.

Helga asked us for a major site makeover: combine THREE sites into one and give it a branding facelift. Much website planning work went into this site redesign, including copywriting and editing, new colors, new logo, new graphics and a major navigation structure change.

The Gestalt Institue of Rhode Island offers training classes to therapy and coaching professionals, as well as one-on-one coaching and therapy to individuals. Helga Matzko is well-known in the Gestalt Therapy field.

Congratulations, Helga, on your new site!

http://www.gestaltri.com